Friday, August 11, 2017

Hey diddle diddle runs rampant

Respect to Daniel Tiffany for his Infidel
Poetics. I measure its brilliance by its
subtitle – subtitles are such an interesting genre, they peek out of the
pockets of the author’s intention and make faces at the reader, they are little
gremlins, or tells, or the overflow that escaped the editor’s “delete”, the Id
making tracks for the Golden West: “Riddles, Nightlife, Substance.” A train of associations that seems to have
gone way off the track and landed in Oz.

One of the other measures of a book, for me, is its
quotes. You gotta quote right. Many academics think quoting is just
credentialing, so they quote the silliest things: As X said, New York is the
first postmodern town. Etc. You want to say, is X always so boring? But
Tiffany, who is also a poet, quotes brilliant and delightful things – finds.
The difference between a quote that is credentialing and a quote that is a find
is the difference between a stamp collection and buried treasure.

Here is something Tiffany found in Mallarme, of all
peeps.

“Indeed, one of Mallarmé’s songs from the nursery
discloses the contagious effect of the rhyme’s illogic on the translator.
Mallarmé adopted the practice of presenting the English song followed by his
prose rendering of it in French (which I translate below):

Hey! diddle, diddle,

The cat and the
ﬁddle,

The cow jumped over the moon;

The little dog laughed

To see such sport

While the dish ran after the spoon.

What a strange
scene! Look at the cat with his violin—and that’s not all: there’s the moon,
and a cow jumping right over it! I act like the little dog, laughing hard to
see such foolishness. And then it seemed to me, as I contemplated this
spectacle, that my ideas ran away with themselves, one after another, just
as—in the words of the song—the dish runs after the spoon. Hey! diddle, diddle.’”

About Me

MANY YEARS LATER as he faced the firing squad, Roger Gathman was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover
ice. Or rather, to discover the profit making potential of selling bags of ice to picnicking Atlantans, the most glorious of the old man's Get Rich schemes, the one that devoured the most energy, the one that seemed so rational for a time, the one that, like all the others - the farm, the housebuilding business, the plastic sign business, chimney cleaning, well drilling, candy machine renting - was drawn by an inexorable black hole that opened up between skill and lack of business sense, imagination and macro-economics, to blow a huge hole in the family savings account. But before discovering the ice machine at 12, Roger had discovered many other things - for instance, he had a distinct memory of learning how to tie his shoes. It was in the big colonial, a house in the Syracuse metro area that had been built to sell and that stubbornly wouldn't - hence, the family had moved into it. He remembered bending over the shoes, he remembered that clumsy feeling in his hands - clumsiness, for the first time, had a habitation, it was made up of this obscure machine, the shoe, and it presaged a lifetime of struggle with machine after machine.